Chapter 101 - 77: Age! The Law Doesn’t Recognize It

"If there’s nothing else... I’m in a hurry to get back to the prosecutor’s office, so I can’t stay and chat."

Seeing that he wasn’t going to press the matter, Xu De immediately spoke up. "Of course, it’s about official business!"

’Official business?’

The only official business between them was the case at No. 18 Middle School.

"What is it!?"

Huang Shi grew serious, his gaze fixed on him.

’This man could cook up a huge scheme without a sound. The fact that he actually had to consult me about what he wanted to ask now...’

’He was one hundred percent cooking up something even bigger!’

Sure enough.

When the other man spoke those few words...

Then...

Xu De looked at him, his brow furrowed, and said in a heavy tone,

"Prosecutor Huang, the defendant Liu Jingqi’s age..."

"It isn’t right."

’The defendant Liu Jingqi’s age isn’t right... Her age isn’t right!’

Suddenly, Huang Shi’s expression turned grave. His brain, which had just begun to relax, tensed up again. A sharp pain pulsed at the back of his skull, but he was in no mood to pay it any mind. Instead, he lowered his voice.

"What do you mean?"

Xu De said, "Exactly what it sounds like."

"I now suspect that there’s a problem with the defendant Liu Jingqi’s age!"

As he finished speaking,

Huang Shi’s eyes narrowed, and he stared at him grimly.

’What he meant was...’

’He was planning to charge straight at a legal red line!’

The conviction itself was already settled, but the great mountain of the Juvenile Protection Law still stood before them, immovable no matter how they tried.

And to win the case... they had to confront this law.

But to put it bluntly, as long as this law was in effect, a ’moral’ victory was impossible.

Unless...

...this law could be nullified during the trial.

"You suspect her age was falsified!?"

Huang Shi’s breathing quickened. His tone was anxious, and fearing that others might overhear, he lowered his voice.

"Lawyer Xu, regarding this..."

"I’d advise you not to dig too deep. All I can say is... her age is legally valid. There’s no evidence of falsification."

"Even if you do dig deeper..."

"...all it will do is put the police in an impossible position, roasting them over the fires of public opinion with no way out. It won’t help the case in the slightest."

’Roasting them over the fires of public opinion with no way out?’

’What does that mean!?’

Lin Yue and Wang Chao, who had just caught up, paused. Their brows furrowed as they began to ponder his words.

As for Xu De...

He suddenly shot back a question. "In other words..."

"You all suspected there was a problem with Liu Jingqi’s age from the beginning!?"

Before the other man could answer, Xu De pressed on.

"Why didn’t you dig deeper!?"

He frowned, the earlier act of playing dumb gone. Instead, he exuded an oppressive air, his sharp gaze seeming to pierce through skin and stare right into one’s soul!

"Because there was nothing to find!!"

A trace of anger crept into Huang Shi’s voice—not directed at Xu De, but at the frustrating situation itself.

"What do you mean?" Lin Yue couldn’t help but ask.

Hearing this, Huang Shi realized he’d lost his composure. He fell silent for a moment, then sighed.

"Let’s sit and talk."

With that, he walked over to a nearby public bench.

Xu De didn’t hesitate. He followed behind him and sat down next to Huang Shi, saying nothing, simply waiting quietly for an answer.

Huang Shi didn’t speak right away. He pulled back his suit jacket, took a pack of cigarettes from an inside pocket, and offered two to Xu De.

Wang Chao waited for a moment, surprised to find he wasn’t being offered one.

CLICK!

Huang Shi lit his cigarette and took a deep drag.

The nicotine instantly flooded his lungs, gradually calming his agitated nerves and slightly easing the throbbing in his temples.

Watching the white smoke curl from his lips, Huang Shi said,

"You should know what the law looks at to determine a person’s age, right?"

Xu De nodded.

Of course he knew.

The law doesn’t care about your actual age, only your official documents. Even if you’re chronologically an adult, as long as your papers say you’re a minor, you won’t bear full criminal responsibility.

The only exception is if you undergo a forensic bone age assessment and a significant discrepancy is found. Only then can your legal age be changed!

Otherwise...

...even if everyone knows the age is wrong, they can only stand by and watch helplessly!

"From the moment the case began, the prosecutor’s office and the police were focused on Liu Jingqi’s age."

"We had a third-party forensic institute conduct a bone age assessment... did you know about that?"

As he spoke, Huang Shi looked at Xu De.

Xu De thought for a moment, then nodded.

He remembered hearing about it.

When Sun Zhigang and Tang Xiaohu hired him, the age issue was one of the first things he noticed in the documents. Tang Xiaohu had explicitly mentioned that the prosecutor had ordered an assessment.

"The assessment put her age between sixteen and eighteen."

Huang Shi clicked his tongue and casually stated the result.

"Her ID card says she’s sixteen, which falls within that range. The age can’t be changed, so she’s being tried as a sixteen-year-old minor."

At this, Lin Yue, who was sitting to the side, suddenly caught on to a key point.

Her brow furrowed, and she asked intently,

"What made the prosecutor’s office suspect her age in the first place?"

’The three of them had focused on her age because of Liu Jingqi’s appearance, her mental fortitude, and their clients’ demands.’

’So what about them?’

’It couldn’t be a coincidence that both sides thought the same thing, could it?’

"Simple. Official internal records."

"Liu Jingqi’s birthday is January 1st. Lawyer Xu, what do you think that implies?"

Huang Shi spoke freely, holding nothing back.

’A January 1st birthday...’

Xu De’s eyes narrowed as his mind quickly retrieved a relevant piece of information.

He ventured a question.

"An orphan?"

The two words hung in the air.

Huang Shi, who had been about to give the answer himself, was momentarily speechless. He stared at Xu De, his lips moving slightly. Even Lin Yue and Wang Chao looked surprised.

Finally,

"Lawyer Xu’s Legal Ability... is truly something else. It’s no wonder Chen Wei lost to you."

Huang Shi gave a wry smile and continued,

"That’s right."

"Liu Jingqi isn’t Liu Hao and Cai Fei’s biological daughter. She’s an orphan."

"To be precise, an orphan from Lusen City’s Jiaqin Welfare Institute, adopted by Liu Hao and Cai Fei eleven years ago."

"The couple suffered from infertility. Eleven years ago, when they were forty-two, they went to the welfare institute and adopted Liu Jingqi, treating her as their own biological daughter."

"Besides her, Jiang Yu and Qiao Wang are also from the same institute, though their ages are within the normal range."

Most people have probably never considered one question.

Which is...

When a welfare institute takes in an orphan, how do the authorities officially determine the child’s age?

After all, many of the children taken in are just infants, unable to even speak, and the institute has no way of finding their parents.

Theoretically, it should be impossible to know their exact identity.

And that is indeed the case. The welfare institute doesn’t know their birth identity, so...

...for these children, there are generally two ways of assigning an age.

One is to estimate the age to set the birth year, then use the month and day the child was found as their birthday.

The other...

...is to set it as February 1st, but the most common date by far is January 1st!

"When they’re taken in, a rough bone age test is done. To be conservative, they allow a margin of error of plus or minus three years."

"The welfare institute will almost always set the birth date based on the lowest possible age."

Huang Shi explained slowly.

Age is a huge issue. To give the orphans a better chance, the institutes generally go to great lengths to keep their official ages low, avoiding situations where they’re too old to be enrolled in school and so on.

A forensic assessment is more precise, with a margin of error of only plus or minus two years.

’By that calculation... Jiaqin Welfare Institute might have even given her an extra year. It wasn’t the most extreme case. Otherwise, Liu Jingqi could theoretically be living as a fifteen-year-old right now.’

In any case...

"From a legal standpoint,"

"you can’t find any angle to challenge her age."

"Even if that age was deliberately set low, you have no way to overturn it!"

Huang Shi smoked, his tone flat, but it was laced with deep-seated frustration.

Lin Yue interjected, "But don’t welfare institutes, in order to make children more adoptable... deliberately lower their age by a year or two?"

"Even if Liu Jingqi is still a minor..."

"...if she were determined to be seventeen, that would still relieve a huge amount of pressure for us!"

Within the juvenile justice system, the laws become significantly more lenient for every couple of years younger a defendant is.

It’s extremely difficult to get a life sentence for a sixteen-year-old.

But at seventeen, with an exceptional performance in court, there’s a high probability of securing a life sentence for this case!

’And at the time of the crime, even with the two layers of ’padding’—the margin of error in bone age and the welfare institute’s tendency to make children seem younger—Liu Jingqi was still only fourteen days shy of her seventeenth birthday on paper.’

’Take away that padding, and she was one hundred percent over seventeen!’

"Hah."

Huang Shi let out a humorless laugh.

He took another drag from his cigarette.

"But,"

"the law doesn’t recognize..."

"The law doesn’t recognize that as a valid reason!"